i had more than one teacher whose religion was elliot's four quartets. and we learned attitude from yates and from the greek anthology. we wanted to come proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb. and i loved this epitaph of an ancient greek sailor. it's in a greek anthology translation by dudley fitz, wonderful teacher. tomorrow the wind will have fallen, tomorrow i will be safe in harbor, tomorrow, i said, and death spoke in that little word. o stranger, this is the nemesis of the spoken word, bite back the daring tongue that would say tomorrow. we marveled at keats' ability to imagine what it would feel like to be a billiard ball rolling across a smooth table. we hungered for lives that had the emotional range of shakespeare's sonnets. and if we were going to be saved, we knew it would be by literature. and it was the french historian jules membership lay who put it best for me as i tried in my mid 40s to turn to biography, to life writing. history, he said -- and you could think that he meant to include biography and fiction -- history, he said, is n